September ’10: Advisory Board member Homa Nasab gets Louis and me a gig interviewing Getty Villa Curator of Antiquities Mary Louise Hart for her blog MuseumViews about her brand new exhibit, “The Art of Ancient Greek Theatre,” the largest assembly of Greek Vases relating to theater ever assembled. We are particularly moved and startled by:

-The prominently displayed Pronomos Vase, depicting the God Dionysus (of wine, theatre, and epiphany) and attendant actors, celebrating what appears to be a cast party, following the successful run of a Satyr Play.

We are invited to a Symposium organized in conjunction with the exhibit, and a luncheon gathering scholars and theater people, whose purpose is to discuss, what else, the Satyr Play in contemporary performance.

Turns out Satyr Plays were burlesque style deconstructions of famous stories, starring not a chorus of city elders or attendants, but hairy, horny, drunken goat people, or Satyrs. The idea of mixing a Satyr Play with a rock concert comes fairly early on.

October ’10: I’ve now read through more than a few translations, none of which do a whole lot for me. I finally pick up Percy Byyshe Shelley’s 1819 verse translation, and respond very favorably to the wit, language, and over-the-top epic style of the piece. I start talking to Jayson Landon Marcus and Benjamin Sherman (who’d worked as Technical Director and Sound Technician on our previous show) about the idea of scoring the piece. I hand a short passage to them that becomes “For Your Gaping Gulf” and we are off and running.

The rest of the month is spent picking Shelley’s adaptation apart:

1.I We Identify verse passages that can be easily put to music. These end up being:

March ’11: The show sells out its final weekend and an extension is added at SOSE. It is officially added to Pasadena Playhouse’s calendar. We lose Dionysus due to a scheduling conflict, but the show, always organic, grows by three songs: “Wine Conquers All,” “Beside You” (which introduces the Goddess Athena), and “Galatea,” drawing further dramaturgical links to Ovid’s story from the Metamorphosis. Ian Vargo joins the crew as a sound engineer.